Media Watch August 15, 2007

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

By PJH Staff

SL Trib’s Polygamy Page almost as fun as real thing
Growth is lacking among fundamentalist Mormon groups in the Intermountain West and in other areas, Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune reports in a recent article. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be out of a job anytime soon. Adams has been reporting on the estimated 37,000 polygamists in our country on a regular basis since 2004. In 2006 it became her full-time beat, and now the Tribune features a separate webpage dedicated to polygamy, complete with a polygamy blog.

“There are a lot living here in the Salt Lake Valley,” Adams said, “but you wouldn’t notice.”

Although the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder Day Saints publicly abandoned polygamy in 1890, the practice lives on in four major sects and many smaller ones. The highest concentration of polygamist families lives in the neighboring towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., just south of Zion National Park, according to Adam’s report. The combined population of the two towns is 6,500.

Although Adams says she tries to be as unbiased as possible, it’s inevitable that she touches a nerve. “They hate me!” was the title of her recent blog entry. Apparently Adams came to work to find a nasty voicemail from a reader criticizing an article she wrote about a Colorado City Town Marshal who wrote a letter to a then-fugitive polygamist sect leader, Warren S. Jeffs, asking for advice. The letter may mean the Marshal’s removal from office. The reader said her article on the matter was poorly written.

 “Sometimes you just don’t get the story off to a good start,” she blogged, “and I appreciate – really! – hearing the criticism as well as the praise when I get it right.”
Amen.

Take a peek at the Polygamy Page at www.sltrib.com/polygamy.
— Sam Petri

Kwicherbitchin’
On the heels of the city’s symbolic burial of the so-called n-word earlier this year, a New York City councilwoman introduced legislation to discourage but not effectively ban use of the word “bitch” (aka the b-word).

The New York Times quoted Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn saying the term is “a paradigm of shame and indignity,” for all women.

But the word, which in the 1990s became particularly stigmatized as a misogynistic term rampant in hip hop culture, has in the more recent years been divested of some of its derisive powers. Let’s face it: The b-word is hardly a sacred cow anymore, and the only way to get much oomph out of it these days is to preface it with some other modifier the Gilbert Gottfrieds among us hopes the city won’t target next.

As with most things in this crazy world, it’s all a matter of context. Michael Grynberg, the NYT columnist who explored the use of the word in the city, tended to land himself in the West Village, where gossip queens and cabaret performers sling the word with endearment, not uncommonly empowering themselves by self-appointing the moniker.
Post-war Germany outlawed anti-Semitic rhetoric and use of those terms can actually land you in prison. That won’t be the case in New York, where Councilwoman Mealy acknowledged enforcing a ban would be impossible.

Yes, this linguistic fad out of America’s most trendsetting metropolis will probably fade soon enough, as they all do. And it is not likely the efforts of a handful of elected officials will change the way subcultures constantly adapt to and contextualize words and ideas. A conversation about language is never a bad thing though, given the context.
— Ben Cannon
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Media Watch August 15, 2007 | Planet JH News Article: Media Watch

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